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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 5fccbd2 | There's no story that's the start of itself. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| c75d3fd | In the presence of love, hearth and quest become one. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| f1ccf1d | I don't know how to answer. I know what to think, but words in the head are like voices under water. They are distorted. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 1d48ded | I like the way the morning can be stormy and the afternoon clear and sparkly as a jewel in the water. Put your hand in the water to reach for a sea urchin or a sea shell, and the thing desired never quite lies where you had lined it up to be. The same is true of love. In prospect or contemplation, love is where it seems to be. Reach in to lift it out and your hand misses | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| ed64e3d | The librarian was explaining the benefits of the Dewey decimal system to her junior--benefits that extended to every area of life. It was orderly, like the universe. It had logic. It was dependable. Using it allowed a kind of moral uplift, as one's own chaos was also brought under control. 'Whenever I am troubled,' said the librarian, 'I think about the Dewey decimal system.' 'Then what happens?' asked the junior, rather overawed. 'Then I u.. | dewey-decimal filing jung librarians libraries life logic order | Jeanette Winterson | |
| aae3625 | What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing? | life love | Jeanette Winterson | |
| 5b7bf4a | You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return. And the wound will take you there. | reckoning reconciliation return revenge wounds | Jeanette Winterson | |
| 06d3d9a | I'm sorry. You went too far.' Lovely. What an epitaph. | loki thor | Joanne Harris | |
| f9cd816 | For a time, then, we stay. For a time. Till the changes. | moving travel | Joanne Harris | |
| 72a9eed | There was something about total loyalty, uncritical devotion, endless patience, perpetual forgiveness and the general inability to believe that a loved one could ever do anything wrong that, frankly, just gave him the creeps. | forgiveness love loyalty patience | Joanne Harris | |
| 76df442 | Garden work clears the mind. | Joanne Harris | ||
| b1484d4 | Their love was something which coloured the air between them like sunlight. | Joanne Harris | ||
| fa390b1 | Take a little thought experiment. Imagine all the rampage school shooters in Littleton, Colorado; Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; Springfield, Oregon; and Jonesboro, Arkansas; now imagine they were black girls from poor families who lived instead in Chicago, New Haven, Newark, Philadelphia, or Providence. Can you picture the national debate, the headlines, the hand-wringing? There is no doubt we'd be having a national debate about in.. | angry-white-males angry-young-man class class-struggle guns media media-bias media-distortion privilege school-shooting school-shootings white-privilege | Michael S. Kimmel | |
| 5d01313 | Don't be ashamed of reliving your childhood, Ox, because all of us must do it now and then to maintain our sanity. | sanity | Barry Hughart | |
| 3d6eb3b | there is also such a thing as ersatz happiness, perhaps happiness exists only as an ersatz, perhaps all happiness is an ersatz for happiness. | Günter Grass | ||
| be05215 | So much of the past in encapsulated in the odds and ends. Most of us discard more information about ourselves than we ever care to preserve. Our recollection of the past is not simply distorted by our faulty perception of events remembered but skewed by those forgotten. The memory is like twin orbiting stars, one visible, one dark, the trajectory of what's evident forever affected by the gravity of what's concealed. | perception | Sue Grafton | |
| 7d6c363 | Perhaps when we're forced to forfeit what we own, we lose any sentimental associations. Perhaps pawning our valuables frees us in the same way a house fire destroys not only our worldly goods, but our attachment to what's gone. | v-is-for-vengeance | Sue Grafton | |
| 33e9c24 | We all do things we regret. It's part of growing up. | Sue Grafton | ||
| 6116c71 | Missing someone is a vague, unpleasant sensation, like gnawing anxiety. It isn't as concrete as grief, but it's just as pervasive and there's no escaping it. | Sue Grafton | ||
| a5728de | She looked around. "Oh, I've just got to hug somebody! You!" And she hugged Puck, the little ghost horse. "And you." She hugged Pook, and Peek, and even the nose of the moat monster. "But not you," she decided, encountering the zombie." | Piers Anthony | ||
| 4e60ee3 | They [parents] can resist the impulse to "prove" their love by showering children with things they do not need and give them precisous time and attention instead." | Hillary Rodham Clinton | ||
| 7eb3c66 | Along the way, I've tried not to make the same mistake twice, to learn, to adapt, and to pray for the wisdom to make better choices in the future. | Hillary Rodham Clinton | ||
| ffa044d | I cannot escape my life but can only use my determination and courage to make it the best I can. | determination | Karen Cushman | |
| 2f58350 | Their constant outward-looking, their mania for radios, cars, and a thousand other trinkets made them dream and fix their eyes upon the trash of life, made it impossible for them to learn a language which could have taught them to speak of what was in their or others' hearts. The words of their souls were the syllables of popular songs. | american-culture materialism superficiality | Richard Wright | |
| c2fdb29 | The southern whites would rather have had Negroes who stole, work for them than Negroes who knew, however dimly, the worth of their own humanity. Hence, whites placed a premium upon black deceit; they encouraged irresponsibility; and their rewards were bestowed upon us blacks in the degree that we could make them feel safe and superior. | Richard Wright | ||
| 67cd181 | First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rusack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pre.. | love war | Tim O'Brien | |
| 273dd1a | Sometimes the bravest thing in the world was to sit through the night and feel the cold in your bones. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 439576b | Do we choose sleep? Hell no and bullshit - we fall. We give ourselves over to possibility, to whim and fancy, to the bed, to the pillow, the tiny white tablet. And these choose for us. | sleep | Tim O'Brien | |
| 453d28f | It is easy, of course, to fear happiness. There is often complacency in the acceptance of misery. We fear parting from our familiar roles. We fear the consequences of such a parting. We fear happiness because we fear failure. But we must overcome these fears. We must be brave. It is one thing to speculate about what might be. It is quite another to act in behalf of our dreams, to treat them as objectives that are achievable and worth achiev.. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| a836039 | They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they .. | embarrassment shame war | Tim O'Brien | |
| 8492511 | When you spend your whole life living in a hole," he said, "the only way you can go is up." | Louis Sachar | ||
| 4057550 | If only, if only, the moon speaks no reply; Reflecting the sun and all that's gone by. Be strong my weary wolf, turn around boldly. Fly high my baby bird, My angel, my only. | Louis Sachar | ||
| 813ce82 | She had seen just now what she had only sensed before, that the whole world was ready to be their enemy, and suddenly what she and Carol had together seemed no longer love or anything happy but a monster between them, with each of them caught in a fist. | impossible-love lesbian lgbt love patricia-highsmith society starcrossed-lovers the-price-of-salt | Patricia Highsmith | |
| ef42528 | If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful , or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with every gesture. | Patricia Highsmith | ||
| 7ac32d5 | In the meantime, I'll wish it upon a star.'- Michael Cooper | hope love star wish | Julie Ann Knudsen | |
| e392873 | If one could drown in the grass, thought Elphie, that might be the best way to die. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 4f2e6a3 | So she listened hard. And she began to evolve, because stories work their magic that way. They build conviction and erode conviction in equal measure. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 99051f7 | Horrors. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 7b3d1e9 | He hadn't yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing they hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 1bd4b18 | Wishing is the beginning of imagination. They practice wishing when they are young things, and then -when they have grown - they have a developed imagination. Which can do some harm - greed, that kind of thing - but more often does them some good. They can imagine that things might be different. Might be other than they seem. Could be better. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 675fbc7 | We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out. Once we really get the full measure of it--we're slow learners, we women--we dry up in disgust and sensibly halt production. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 207e27e | The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 6aff9d0 | What is the use of beauty? i have lived my life surrounded by painters, and still I do not know the answer. But i suspect, some days, that beauty helps protect the spirit of mankind, swaddle it and succor it, so that we might survive. Beauty is no end in itself, but if it makes or lives less miserable so that we might be more kind-well, then, lets have beauty, painted on our porcelain, hanging on our walls, ringing through our stories. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 084c649 | Doubt was much more energy efficient than conviction. | Gregory Maguire |